Cor blimey! I just bought 10 (yes TEN!) books for a pound! Tipton Library are trying to get rid of old books, and rather than pay to get rid of them, they're selling them in tens. For a pound! I had a bit of trouble finding ten good ones, but I'm so chuffed that I don't care that I've become the not-so-proud owner of a Mills & Boon novel.

The web side of CoFfEE is working, although I've only uploaded one entry. This is the database of long and (hopefully) helpful error explanations. We called it SteakKnife, for some reason that neither of us remember anymore. The single enrty is '(' expected. Feel free to peek, but remember that it's not in any way finished.

I've been dragging my feet writing a journal article that my supervisor has been asking for, and now I have a good excuse for coming back to it later - the Institute of Physics are publishing a book based on the work presented at Eunite 2002 and they want the articles expanded into chapters. So I still have to spend more time writing about my research than I get to actually do it. Oh well.

I've also tidied up a couple of little projects that I messed around with while experimenting with python. I'll put these somewhere sensible at some point.

todo2html creates HTML from TODO files. It has support for 2 levels of todo items, and highlighting for done/pending items. An example of the output is here - created from this file. Don't worry if you hate the highlighting, that will soon be configurable.

wcmon stands for Website Change Monitor. This is something that I've been meaning to do for ages. The idea is that it informs you when a website changes. This is already quite nice - you can add and remove sites, show all monitored sites, check all or individual URLs, update all or individual records and show a list of sites that have changed since the last update.
The idea is that it can be run regularly, with the output displayed by something like the beautiful waste of resources, karamba, or automagically mailed to interested parties.
Very soon, it will have more advanced features like:

Notification lists - email addresses of people to inform of change - one list per URL

Record times of previous updates, so if you don't tell it to update for a while you can see how many changes were made

Skip patterns. This is something that's needed so that sites like memepool, that have bits of HTML that change regularly, but aren't really interesting content changes, can still be monitored

OK. Blogging has never really grabbed me, but Sarah has told me on more than one occasion that I should start. Not that this is my first start. Lets see if I can keep it up this time.

What I'm up to right now is:

Research. Right now I'm rewriting a lot of my old code before I do anything else. My early code was written quickly, with little testing and has been extensively modified since I started. Now I need well written, fully tested code so that I can feel safe basing the rest of my research on the results it gives me.Hopefully the Uni. will let me make this stuff Free. We'll see.

Working with Sarah on CoFfEE. Which stands for Compiler Friendlification and Error Explanation. Sarah doesn't much like the friendlification bit, but I think that that's the bestest bit. If anyone has a better idea, let us know.

Unfortunately, the first two items (the first one mainly) take up most of the time I'm prepared to sit in front of my computer. In the spare time I do have I play with my dog, make (terrible) music, listen to (great) music, watch more films than is probably healthy, start writing apps that I don't have time to finish (a linux tracker in the style of Impulse (but obviously better :), a great idea for a simple but addictive network game, and more), read (I spend about as much on books each month as I do on food), and try to reduce my use of brackets and black-countryisms.

New Advogato Features

New HTML Parser: The long-awaited libxml2 based HTML parser
code is live. It needs further work but already handles most
markup better than the original parser.